Preliminary analysis of built environment and cause specific visits to community health centres in Medan city, Indonesia

Abstract

This study aims to analyse the relationship between urban built environmental features and population health in Medan city, Indonesia. We used the local community health centres as unit of analysis. We included nine urban environmental features as the independent factors for the number of visits for mental disorders, hypertension, diabetes type 2 and all cause mortality as our health outcomes. Poisson model revealed that increased transport infrastructures, open spaces and education institutes were associated with increased cause specific visits to health centres; while increased road intersections marginally decreased the visits. The prioritization of built environment for health in the scenario of Medan city might be different from the other cities.